


the top of the list

by CorvidFeathers



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Death, Ethics of Resurrection, Gen, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-07-25 10:02:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7528456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorvidFeathers/pseuds/CorvidFeathers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death comes for Doctor Ziegler.</p>
<p>(Or, Reaper tries to check a much-anticipated name off of his list, and Mercy realizes the consequences of trying to save Gabriel Reyes all those years before.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been something that has been sitting in my head ever since I first started to get into the lore of Overwatch, and Mercy in particular. This is my first Overwatch fic, so I'd love any constructive criticism you may have!  
> A big thanks to timeless-deduction, who introduced me to Overwatch, and also will do amazing things like beta a chapter of fic despite the fact it is 4 am. She's amazing.

A light had been steadily blinking on Angela’s communications array for a week.

It had been easy to ignore at first.  The first time she noticed it, she was returning from a long day out under the hot sun of Iraq.  All she had wanted was to pry off her Valkyrie suit, wash the grime and filth from her skin, and get what little rest she could out of the waning night.  

[You have ONE unheard message] the computer had announced when she stepped from the clinic into her lab.  A glance at the message’s origin made it easy to dismiss. She had nothing personal against Winston; she had fond memories of him, and of other Overwatch agents.  But those days were behind her.  

Those days were far behind her.

No longer did she bounce from conflict to conflict, doing her best to keep her allies alive while still maintaining her oaths and morals.  Now she poured her efforts into humbler, more practical ventures, like this clinic.  Built in the heart of diseased and conflict-torn Iraq, Dr. Angela Ziegler, and not Mercy, was doing what she could to help. Without access to the resources she once had, she had no hope of recreating the near-miracles she had performed during her tenure as an Overwatch agent, but that had only forced to invent more economical, creative uses of her knowledge of nanobiology.  And she still had her suit and her staff.  

Her name and experience was enough to attract a small number of bright, up-and-coming young doctors and nurses to the clinic; many were chased off in the first few months of brutal, heart-wrenching work, but even more stayed.  Angela was deeply grateful to each one.  Together, they were doing more good than she had ever done running around with Jack and Ana.

Overwatch was a mistake that did not need to be revived. Watching its slow, painful death as malevolent forces decayed away all that had once been noble about it had only confirmed what she had believed all along.  Organizations like it were deeply misguided ideas, prone to doing more harm than good in the world.

But she could not shake her fond memories of the team that she had once called family.

And she couldn’t quite bring herself to delete the message.

So it remained, blinking away on her communications array.

Every night when she stepped into her lab, she was greeted with the same robotic announcement.

[You have ONE unheard message]

That evening, she was particularly unequipped to face that blinking light.  

The situation in Iraq was precarious.  The year before, an epidemic had broken out in Baghdad.  It had quickly been identified as a weaponized disease, a biological weapon that a terrorist organization calling themselves Talon had stolen and then unleashed.  Since the beginning of its spread, Angela had been working with her colleagues to develop and dispense a cure, as well as auxiliary methods of dealing with and reducing the spread of the disease.  The task would have been daunting even if the disease in question had been something comparably ordinary.  The weaponized disease– perhaps inspired by some of the nanotechnology Angela herself developed– shifted and evolved faster than the typical disease.  Cures had a short shelf-life; each new one was usually rendered useless in a matter of weeks.  

A year’s work had paid off, and what some had feared would turn into a plague of devastating proportions had been fought off, but it had still left the country on the brink of yet another political crisis.  Worse, now that is was clear the epidemic had been mostly contained, international attention and funding was waning.

Plus, the disaster left Iraq on the brink of another political upheaval.  Tensions were high and outbreaks of violence were becoming more frequent than outbreaks of disease.  Angela and her medical staff, who were, with a few exceptions, relative interlopers, were becoming more and more unwelcome on the city streets.      

With cuts to her funding and threats to her staff, it wasn’t clear how much longer Angela could keep her clinic running at maximum effectiveness.  

But people were still dying. People were dying, and she had the means to stop it.  People were dying and it was her responsibility to stop it.  

The breaking point came one day when two of her nurses were killed on the street.  One the same day, an outbreak blossomed in a neighborhood whose battered water pipeline happened to run too close to one of the many hastily-built cemeteries that had sprung up around the city.

The same day, she received word from Zurich from the ties she had in the government.  They wanted her clinic shut down; they wanted their national asset home and safe, sitting on the national trophy shelf where she belonged.  And they were going to heavily encourage her sponsors to cut all her funding.

Angela returned to her lab that day exhausted and dispirited.  In the clinic, the other doctors were still working to bring in the victims of the latest outbreak; it was too many for this clinic to handle, but with much of the international aid packed up and gone home, and the recent uptick in politically-oriented violence, the local hospitals had become overwhelmed again as well.  

Angela had worked almost twenty-four hours straight, elbows-deep in grime and bodily fluids, before one of the other doctors had ordered her to rest.  

She did not truly need as much rest as they might think.  Her body was not wholly natural any longer; she had found it necessary to augment it with certain elements of her nanobiological research.  She was no super-soldier, like Morrison or Reyes, but there were… certain perks that came with her altered biology.

But twenty-four hours was pushing it, even for her.

Despite her weariness, she couldn’t sleep. Instead, she found herself at her desk, staring at the blinking light on her communications array.  She tried to distract herself with her latest research, and even a novel when that failed, but her eyes kept flicking back to the blinking light.

She could feel the world shifting under her again, about to throw her into the dust as it had with the fall of Overwatch. Perhaps it was time to move on, to return to Switzerland and seek another place where she could help, as had become her duty.  

She was not a warrior.  She could not, and would not snatch up the pennant of some cause, unless it was peace.  She sought only to help where she could.

Even that role so often left her feeling powerless.

There was still so much death, so much suffering, and no matter how hard she worked, she could not save everyone.  

Suddenly, Angela was all too aware of the stench of death that clung to her, and to the lab.  Even after scrubbing herself down twice in the shower, even after stripping her Valkyrie suit off and cleaning it meticulously with antibacterial and antiviral agents, she could not escape the smell.  It seemed to cling to her.

She washed her hands until they were raw, and even took apart her caduceus staff to clean it, and still the stench of death lingered, permeating every room.  

At last she slumped at her worktable, shoving aside stacks of reports and notes to rest her head in her hands.  Her hands were trembling, and her breathing coming in short gasps as she struggled to rationalize her way out of the panic.  

Funny, how even her modified body fell prey to the same weaknesses as it had before.

That was when she noticed the black smoke curling around her ankles and the feet of the desk.

It took her exhausted mind a moment to process the strangeness of the site, and even begin the formulate a response.

In that moment, a figure materialized beside her, and something cold and familiar was pressed up against the back of her neck.

“Doctor Ziegler,” a deep, rasping voice said.  It had an alien quality, reverberating slightly even in the cramped quarters of Angela’s lab.  A detached part of Angela’s mind processed that information analytically, while the rest of her was still frozen in fear.  “Back to your old tricks I see.”

The voice almost sounded familiar, but the panic that was clawing into her chest did not allow her to follow that train of thought.

“What do you want?” she said, her voice high and clear.  Her pistol, from her old Overwatch days, was hidden in one of the drawers of the desk she was leaning against.  If she could reach it…   “Who are you?”

“You’re not in the position to be asking question, doc,” the voice rasped, and something else was jammed into her neck. The barrel of another gun.  

The following moment of tension felt like it stretched on forever.

“This will quickly become a tiresome conversation,” Mercy said quietly.  “If I say nothing, and you say nothing.”  Anything to distract this person.  Anything to extend her life a few moments longer, because a few moments was what had always mattered…

“Death has not left its mark on you, doctor, has it?” the voice rasped.  Suddenly, there was a hand gripping her shoulder, sharp points digging into her flesh, as she was torn out of her chair and thrown onto the floor.  She scrambled up onto her knees, before hands caught her again, holding her down.

A dark figure loomed over her.  Its edges seemed to be wavering at first, smoke-like and indistinct.  A white face- a skull- leered down at her.  The stench of rot- of death- hung so strongly in the air that bile rose in Angela’s throat.  She forced her eyes from its face, and breathed through her mouth.

The form seemed to solidify, and she could identify it as that of a well-muscled person, clothed in a long black coat.  A sharply-pointed hand grabbed her face, forcing her to look upwards again, towards that leering face.  A mask, she realized.

“Not a line,” the voice mused.  There was something like amusement in its voice, but beneath that lay a deep anger.  Its grip on her face tightened, as it brought up its other arm to jab a shotgun into her chest.  Sharply-pointed fingers began to draw blood.  “Not a gray hair.  If I hadn’t suffered the years, I would think we parted ways yesterday.”  The laughter that bubble out from under the mask bore no trace of mirth.  “Was that what you were doing, doc, when you wrought this upon me?  Running trials?”  Another low laugh filled her ears.  “I suppose we’ll have to see just how well your work on yourself holds up.  I doubt you cursed yourself the way you cursed me.”

Angela’s mind spun.  Part of her was convinced that this was some nightmare, but the cold floor of her lab beneath her was all too real, as were the sharp points of pain digging into her face, and the discomfort as she was forced to look at the masked figure.  

“What…” she gasped.  “Who…”

“Don’t recognize me, doc?” the voice snarled.  There was so much hatred there that she recoiled instinctively.  The figure drew back a hand and clubbed the side of her head with the side of the shotgun it held.  

Pain flashed through her, and she sunk to the ground, her hands on her head as her thoughts went to the gun in her desk.  If she could only reach it…

  Perhaps she could defeat a nightmare?   What was this creature?

Those accusations, and that voice…

“Bear the weight of your actions,” the figure spit, and cold hands were on her again wrenching her upwards.  “You have cheated death one too many times, Doctor Ziegler. Now it is here.  Perhaps it will be merciful, if you confess the harm you have done in your cowardice.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Angela said coldly.  The adrenaline had finally kicked in.  It had been a time since she had been in a true combat situation; since she had truly been Mercy, instead of just Dr. Angela Ziegler.  Even without her Valkyrie suit, even with her staff and pistol out of reach, she was Mercy in the face of this attacker.  “I work to help people.  That’s all I have ever done.”

This man- and the figure seemed to be a man- was probably merely some sort of augmented assassin.  Bearing some form of advanced camouflaging techniques or…

“Delusions, doc,” the man said, pressing his shotgun to the side of her head.  She flinched, and the mask almost seemed to smile.  “All you have done, you did to escape your own end.  Dragging out the lives of others, denying them peace to serve your own ends…  That is not the work of a good Samaritan.  But you always did like to play God.”

It was those words that finally made it click.  

Those words had been thrown at her before.  

When she had brought Genji back from the brink of life.  “It would have been more merciful to let the boy die,” Reyes had murmured to her, after he saw how her patient struggled in the first days of his recovery.  “But Mercy likes to play God, doesn’t she?”

Perhaps he had had a point; Genji had not been happy with his resurrection.  He was not truly himself anymore, he confessed to her one day. More machine than flesh, deprived of much of that which he had once enjoyed, he had joined Overwatch merely because it was the only thing he felt he could do.  

She had not set out to make weapons for Overwatch, but in that instance she had, in a way.

Time had mended the rift between her and Reyes, though only just.

Until he had thrown those words at her again, in the last days of Overwatch.  When she had thought she would soon perfect technology that would allow the dead themselves to be brought back.

“Don’t play god. Leave the dead to rest,” he had spat at her one day.  “Touch my corpse, Doctor Ziegler, and I’ll come back and kill you.”

Perhaps he knew that she would be there when the Watchpoint exploded.  He couldn’t have known that it would be her, alone, who pulled his body and Jack’s from the rubble.  He couldn’t have known how she would stand there, bleeding and half-broken herself, watching two of the people she had come to see as family breathing their last. Almost unrecognizable.

Then, she did not know that is was he who caused the explosion.  She knew the rumors, she knew the arguments that Gabriel and Jack had, arguments that always teetered on the edge of violence, and she had her own suspicions at that point.  But she had not known the scope of the betrayal facing Overwatch.

If she had known then, she wasn’t sure if she would have done anything different.

But she had tried her best to pull Gabriel Reyes back from the brink.  In that moment of panic and pain, she had pulled him into the ruins of her lab and used the latest, untested version of her life-restoring nanobiological tech on him.  

For a moment, it had seemed to work.  Wounds had begun to knit together, and there had been a few feeble beats of his heart.

And then suddenly it had gone wrong, and his flesh had begun to blacken, and then fall away from the bones, until those too disintegrated into black dust.

“Reyes,” she breathed, staring up at the smoky black figure.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for all the time it took to update and finish this. Life had been kicking my ass a bit this month, and I got a small writing job that leaves me less time to write stuff like this. I enjoyed writing this chapter, though, even if it gave me quite a bit of trouble.

A low laugh rumbled out from behind the cruel lines of Reyes’ mask.

“It took you long enough, doctor,” he said. 

“I-I thought you were dead,” Angela said.  “I… I tried to resurrect you, but the technology was untested.  The procedure failed.  I saw your body crumble…”

“I wish it had failed,” Reyes spat.  His talons dug deeper into the skin of her face, and he jammed a shotgun up under her throat.  “Instead you only got it halfway right.  I’m not dead, doc, but I’m not alive either.  I’m both, and neither.  Every single moment of the last five years has been agony that I cannot end, all because you could not let me die!”  The last word rose to a shout, and Angela heard more of Gabriel’s inflections breaking through the strange hollowness of his voice.

“I-I couldn’t let you die.”  The pure loathing in his voice shook her.  She had tried.  Even had she known he was a traitor, that he had tried to destroy everything they all had worked for, and she would still tried to save him, because death was a yawning, terrifying abyss which rendered all things in life obsolete.  Death was the enemy, that had to be thwarted at all costs.

And he had been her friend.

“You should have,” he hissed, and again his form seemed to smudge around the edges.  The claws that bit into her face dissolved for a moment into cold, stinking smoke, before reforming.  He laughed again, a coughing, guttural sound.  “I fall apart, and reform, and die, and live, and all I wanted at first was for it to stop.  But it won’t, no matter how many bullets anyone puts in me.  So, knowing I am stuck like this, I might as well take advantage of the opportunity to destroy those who did this to me.  Starting with you, Mercy.”

He spat her callsign like an insult, and she shuddered.  Her mind was still spinning, trying to piece together how her technology had gone so wrong.  How Reyes could exist like… this.  Perhaps he was no longer truly Reyes in flesh, but nanobiological reconstructive cells trying to imitate the life of tissue long lost… Or perhaps he had been too far gone, and his cells had only partially taken to the treatment, and now were constantly decaying and regenerating. 

“This isn’t what I meant for you, Gabriel,” she said.  Her shoulders slumped, and it was all she could do to fight the tears back.  “I…  I just wanted to save you.”

“You were the one afraid of death, Angela,” he said, his voice a tad softer.  A tad more like the one she remembered.  “Not me.  But you won’t have much more time to be afraid.”

He let go of her face, and pulled another shotgun from his coat. 

“I could try to fix you,” she said.  He shouldn’t have turned out like this.  She had long since stabilized her resurrection technology, though since the fall of Overwatch, she no longer had the funds to run such costly procedures, and she had kept her breakthroughs a close secret to try to keep the knowledge from being misused.  “I know more than a did back then.  I was…  I’ve improved it since then.”

“Of course you have,” Reyes said contemptuously, and shook his head.  “No.  I’m beyond your help, doctor, and I don’t want your pity.  All I want is for you to suffer and die.”

He pointed one of his shotguns at her chest, and pulled the trigger.

His movement was just a tad too slow, and with her hands off of her, Mercy was able to jerk herself to the side a fraction of a second before the gun went off.  The bullet buried itself in her shoulder.

For a moment, she felt nothing.  The adrenaline that had been pumping through her system for the last handful of minutes warded off the pain, as her medical mind told her exactly how bad of shape she would be in.  Her modified body responded differently to injuries than many, but enough sustained damage would still kill her fairly quickly-

She shut down that train of thought and focused on surviving that moment.  She scrambled away from Reyes in the moment it took him to register his shot had not killed her.  A desperate lunge put her in reach of her desk.  Her hand was on the drawer when two dual blasts sounded from Reyes’ shotguns; one tore off part of her desk, and the other tore open her arm before burying itself in the floor.

She got her hands on the pistol, and then spun around to face him.  Her hands were trembling, and it was difficult to raise her wounded arm, but at point-blank range she couldn’t exactly miss him.

She shot him three times, straight at his chest.  At the first pulse of energy that hit him, he stumbled, recoiling as if surprised that she could actually hurt him.  She shot him again, and again, a rush of triumph running through her veins.

When he stumbled and his head dipped down for a moment, she shot him in the face.

The bolt of energy crackled over the mask for an instant, before his entire form dissolved in a swirl of black smoke.

For a moment, she was alone in her lab.  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something flicker.  She spun around, and behind her desk a shadowy form was solidifying. 

The pistol gave him pause, but it wasn’t enough.  Her eyes darted around the room, until they landed on several tubes of one of her staple formulas.  It served as a new way to remotely halt the rapid regenerative growth that was induced by her caduceus staff and similar technologies.  It was a kill-switch, just in case the nanobiological regeneration triggered replication of damaged cells.  It could be targeted, or it could stop the regeneration of all cells; at one point, her superiors at Overwatch had sought to turn it into a weapon.

Half a second was all she had to consider how that might affect Reyes’s strange state.

In truth, she had no idea, but she lunged for it anyway.

Just as Reyes’s shape became corporeal, a vial shattered over his head, dousing him in the liquid.

He shook his head, shaking away shards of glass, and laughed.  “You can’t escape the inevitable, doc,” he said, and cast his shotguns to the floor.

To her consternation, he pulled out another set.  He was toying with her now; he thought he had her helpless.  He could kill her now and be done with it, but clearly that wouldn’t satisfy whatever twisted desire for revenge had poisoned him.

She emptied the clip of her energy pulse pistol into his chest.

A distorted noise that could have been a cry of pain escaped him, as his body convulsed and briefly became incorporeal, and then corporal, and then dissolved entirely.

All that was left was a wavering, sooty pile of ash on Angela’s floor.

“I never intended this for you,” Mercy whispered to her empty lab.  She stood there looking down at the shards of glass and soot on her floor, and the pistol in her hand.

Until his forms wavering, and dissolved into black smoke, and rushed towards her.

For a moment she was enveloped in death.  The smell of it filled her nostrils and her mouth, choking her.  It pressed against her, staining her.  She could feel a filmy residue of rot clinging to her skin, and her hair, and for a moment she was blinded.

And then there were strong arms holding her, one around her waist, and one holding cold metal to her throat.  Reyes’s voice rasped in her ear.

will send your security team running,” he mused.  “They don’t want to lose you.  It would be… inconvenient if they saw me.  I don’t want more word to get out and warn the others.  I’d planned on disposing of you somewhere quietly, without jeopardizing your work here…  but if they see me, I’ll have to kill them all and burn this place to the ground.  That would be a tragedy, wouldn’t it?”

Angela could hear footsteps in a distance hallway.

“Put that toy of a gun down, Mercy.  Accept your death with dignity.”

Angela closed her eyes, trying to restrain the scream that was building inside of her.

She did not want to die.  All of her courage quailed at the thought. 

But her life’s purpose was to help people.

Her life, against the lives of everyone in her clinic?

It was a simple choice, just like trying to resurrect Gabriel had been.

The gun clattered from her fingers.

Reyes laughed again, the same humorless sound.

“Good…” he murmured.  The hand around her waist moved, pulling another shotgun from his coat and pressing it against her head.

A shot rang out.

Angela should not have been able to hear it- it didn’t make sense, hearing a shot that should have gone straight into her skull. 

Reyes’s grip loosened on her, and the shotgun fell away from her chin.  The crack of it hitting the ground broke her reverie, and she kicked backwards.  Another shot rang out, and her foot hit something for a moment, and then passed through it, as the arm still holding her dissolved into smoke.

She floundered for a moment, trying to regain her balance.  The thought of her pistol, lying just out of reach flickered through her mind, but her legs were wobbly and uncoordinated.  She stumbled and fell.

Once Angela was lying on the ground, she couldn’t find the will to rise.  The impact sent a shock through her body, awakening the pain that adrenaline had been staving off.  The air was thick with the smell of her own blood.  Her altered body was not so fragile, not so susceptible to blood loss as others…  But without the embrace of the Valkyrie suit’s nanobiotic field, its ability to heal itself was greatly reduced. 

She was going to pass out, she noted clinically.  Her body could not handle any more strain.  It was a wonder she hadn’t gone into shock.

Her pistol was lying within arms’ reach, but she couldn’t find the will to raise her hand.  How could she have left Gabriel in such a state?  But how could she have even guessed he was alive? 

Let the dead rest.  The words danced through her mind, Gabriel’s sardonic snarl all too easy to remember.  To him, death had dignity, or at least an escape.

Angela had no such notions about death.

There were noises above her.  Voices.  The flicker of a shadow against the walls of her lab.

A figure knelt beside her, and gently rolled her over.

Angela blinked.  Perhaps, in the last few moments, she had died and failed to notice.  Panic-born strength flooded her body for a moment at the thought.  She tried to push herself upward, but a strong hand pushed her back down.

“Be still, child,” a warm voice chided her.  “You’re safe now.”

Peering down at her was a face from her memories.

Older now, with an eyepatch in place of one of her piercing amber eyes, but Angela would recognize Ana Amari anywhere.

That was wrong.  Ana Amari was dead.  Long dead, longer than Gabriel, and Angela hadn’t been involved in any failed attempts at resurrection then…

“H-How,” she managed.

Ana chuckled.  “I tried to retire.”  She lifted her rifle, and Angela flinched away.  Another shot echoed around the small lab.

Angela felt something sting her arm, and then warmth spread through her body.  The wounds on her chest and side ceased throbbing so painfully, and became dull, almost itchy irritations as the muscle and bone knitted together again.

There was another figure standing behind Ana, back turned to them, looking at the door of the lab.  His posture, his form was familiar to her too.  Something glowed faintly red in the dim light.

“That’s… that’s the biotic rifle I helped… develop…  I never wanted you to have that prototype,” she murmured, blinking.  Ana’s form was beginning to waver in her vision.  “I knew it would end up weaponized.”

“I won’t take offense at that, just this once,” Ana said.  She sounded tired, and sad.  “Close your eyes, Angela.  I chased Reaper off.  I’ll make sure you’re safe.”

“Reaper?” Angela said.  Her body felt more leaden by the moment as it succumbed to the inevitable exhaustion, but she fought to stay conscious.  “Ana… it’s… it’s Reyes… I… I made a mistake.”

“I know,” Ana said, and she sounded even more tired, and sad.  Angela had never heard Ana sound that sad before.

“Rest,” was the last thing word Angela could make out.  A conversation happened above her, two voices that were familiar and yet strange to her, but the sentences eluded her.  For a few minutes, there were strong arms around her, carrying her gently.

And then she slept.

When Angela woke, she was alone.

No, she was not alone.  She was in one of the beds in her clinic, attended to by one of the doctors she had helped train, who was anxious to tell her how fortunate she was to survive the attack on her person.  It must have been an attack by one of the local malefactors who would prefer to see the clinic shut down.  It was only due to the quick action of a couple of strange passerby that she had survived. 

It was… surprising.

Logically, she should have woken up in a Watchpoint.  She had expected to be whisked back into the whirlwind that was Overwatch.  It was almost a disappointment.  If Overwatch was gathering together again… what was Overwatch without Ana and Jack?

Apparently, the world would find out.

When she returned to her lab, the computer announced in a robotic voice

[You have TWO unheard messages.]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deus Ex MachANA...  
> I hope this ending is satisfactory, even if it is a bit vague. It will hopefully tie into one of the things I plan to work on next. So far all my Overwatch fic has been focused on Mercy, but I'm eager to explore some other characters as well.


End file.
